


Abacomancy

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 5 Things, 5+1 Things, Angst, M/M, Music, PoA era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 06:55:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10714464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Five records from Hogwarts, 1993-4, and one after.





	Abacomancy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alivingpart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alivingpart/gifts).



**Polvo, _Today’s Active Lifestyles_**

He was tripping on acid in the tenement on Kingston Avenue when the first owl flew into the window. 

He panicked at the noise like he hadn’t since 1982 and practically threw himself onto the floor dislodging most of his papers and books from the table and jostling the record he was playing, Polvo’s _Today’s Active Lifestyles_ , which skipped back to the middle of “Thermal Treasure” and started to stutter. Through the window which seemed almost molten in his delirium he saw the tiny creature flutter a wing weakly against the glass and he slowly began to gather the truth of the matter through the dizzying fog. When he let the bedraggled creature in it pecked him in vengeance in the web between his thumb and forefinger until his hand bled. 

The letter was from the old man whose telltale spidery handwriting against the fine parchment seemed to twist and seethe like devils’ snare. Remus burnt it. 

\--

Two hours later he was coming down and as per usual was nauseous and miserable making ginger tea on the hotplate, and the record had come to the end of the side and was skipping over the playout groove like some obscure John Cage piece, when the second owl flew into the window. This time he reacted less embarrassingly. Outside it was beginning to be dawn, by the stars. His head hurt. Over the rooftops of Crown Heights he could hear the exhaust roaring and the heavy bass of the car clubs going by on Eastern Parkway. The city-waking-up sounds. He didn’t love New York but he liked the mornings and the times he could imagine he was there alone. As though he were the last survivor of some horrific pandemic to which his existing viral infection had made him immune. Though logically he knew there were other werewolves in New York. It was different in America in a way he’d been accustomed to since moving there early in 1987. You were just more likely to be extrajudicially executed by overzealous MLE. 

He went to the window and let the owl in. This one was friendlier, though it also carried a letter from Dumbledore. Remus’s address was scrawled more rushedly on the front-facing fold, inscribed funereally in an evil bloodlike red ink that seeped and ran in the paper. Remus burned this one on the hotplate. 

Since the war the old man had written to him once in a while. Usually they were entreaties to return to London or to parlay with assorted contingents of part-human radicals. Since 1989 Remus had been quasi-employed teaching remedial Defense Against the Dark Arts at a night school in Brownsville, and he made a little extra money consulting with the City of New York’s magical pests removal department. Within these hallowed halls he was responsible for the removal of anything too malevolent to be technically considered a pest, but not malevolent enough to warrant the assignation of a special officer from the MLE’s New York Dark Arts Neutralization Squad (NYDANS). Customarily this meant hinkypunks in subway tunnels (responsible, in fact, for the majority of subway derailings in New York as most major cities), boggarts living in vases and suitcases in antiques dealerships and museums, and ghosts who had taken up residence in historic properties. The most excitement he had ever had as a consultant with MPR was banishing a lethifold from Inwood Hill Park, which had taken him two months. Last time he had taken an assignment of Dumbledore’s he had ended up exsanguinated nearly to death in the Laotian bush. Since then (1986) he had burned most of the correspondence upon receipt. 

When he had finished the ginger tea he opened the window and brushed the owl feathers off the outside sill and climbed out to sit on the fire escape. On second thought he went in again for his cigarettes; once he had found them in the mess of paperwork dislodged from the table in his earlier panic and climbed back outside found he had missed the sunrise. He had seen enough that summer, working nights at the school or in the subway tunnels, and they had been beautiful and bloody, seething humid heat; his coworker had explained it had to do with some Muggle science thing, the sort Remus had always assumed were simply their attempt to explain in quantifiable terms what he had always called magic. 

When he saw the third owl over the rooftops he prayed it was a crow or something until it came so close and so silent (swooping without sound in an artful shadow across the brick tenements and graffitied rooftops) he could tell it wasn’t. By that time perhaps it was 6:30. He went inside and shut and locked the window. The owl — it was a demure and exhausted brown — hovered outside for a while tapping its beak against the window but by that time Remus was in the shower. Eventually it picked up and flew away. 

He entertained perhaps thirty seconds concern whilst getting dressed exactly what the letters were about. For certain it was some stupid assignment. The Americans were too (rightfully) concerned about the rise of the Sanguicrat party in their magical congress to care much about British wizarding politics but Remus had heard rumor. Certainly the letter had to have something to do with whatever dark manifestation du jour — a conference of werewolves on an island in the Baltic Sea, a slew of Muggle murders resulting in clinically dissected corpses with a magical signature, a failure of communication between Moldovan authorities and the dementors who guarded their wizarding prison in the Black Sea — Dumbledore and company suspected to be symptomatic of the inevitable. But he had been ignoring those letters now for seven years. 

The fourth owl accosted him on his way to the subway, or perhaps it was only the third having circled back again. Living in New York as a wizard was convenient because no matter how many strange things happened in one’s vicinity it was certain people had seen stranger. It was not the first owl that had attacked him on the street. Nor, he thought with chagrin, would it be the last. A gaggle of Hasidic children watched him from their stoop in a curious silence. Then they looked back to one another and whispered in Yiddish. 

He was alone on the subway platform and so he sat on a bench up by where the front car would arrive and closed his eyes. Which was why he thought perhaps he was dreaming or otherwise (perhaps more likely) tripping still when he opened them again. Present with him suddenly and silently was a silver-blue ectoplasmic bird, brilliant with plumage and strange as an Old Testament angel, sitting on the yellow tile at the edge of the platform. The tunnel was empty and so silent he wondered if this in itself was some complete spellwork orchestrated from wherever he could not see. His wand felt warm in his pocket and yet the rest of him felt shocked through with an overwhelming and rising chill like a rogue wave or a calving iceberg: immensity, certainty. The bird was looking at him with a disappointingly familiar expression straddling curiosity and pity. It was Dumbledore’s patronus, Remus remembered. It opened its beaky mouth and the old man’s voice came out: 

“Remus,” it said. “I really suggest you read that letter.” 

\--

In three days’ time he was in London. He walked in the streets aimlessly and eventually he found he had followed some current out of Spiritus Mundi to their old flat in Camden Town. In the interim eleven years someone had painted it and there was a soft light from inside casting warmth upon the grey street. As if in attempt to connect every event of late into a coherent narrative and as such begin to attempt to digest it he was listening to Polvo’s _Today’s Active Lifestyles_ on cassette on his walkman. “Now I’m the picture hanging upside down and only you can flip it right…” His stomach twisted. After a while he stopped the music and walked quickly back to the Tube in silence. 

He was obliged to go meet the old man at the Leaky Cauldron. Doing this felt like walking some gauntlet. Since functionally locking himself away like a cursed princess in mid-November 1981 and fleeing the country in March of the next year he very purposefully hadn’t consorted with any of the well-behaved British wizarding crowd who had graduated from Hogwarts and taken jobs at the Ministry or the Daily Prophet or Amortentia Records or Obscurus Press or any of the other institutions regarded within the community as validating career-starters. This meant of course the majority of young witches and wizards Remus had known at school. They had all been too busy at work to care much about the war, and as such Remus (and Sirius too, and James and Lily and even Peter) had quit trying to meet them for brunch or coffee once members of the Order started dying. Their fear had seemed very conditional and the pure-blooded among them — sympathetic as they may be — didn’t seem to understand they had little to no reason to fear anything at all. 

His lack of patience for the majority of his schoolfellows had kept him off Diagon Alley throughout the war years to the point where he and Sirius would get necessary potions supplies via owl order. Now it felt like setting foot there would be like stepping out in public without skin. He knew that Dumbledore could only keep big secrets, not little ones. Not that any of it really was a secret. It might have been tattooed on his fucking face. He remembered looking at himself in the mirror in the hostel bathroom in Marrakesh after having not dared for several months and thinking probably the adjective to best describe how he looked was _stricken_. 

At the Leaky Tom saw him and brought him a fingerprinted tumbler of straight whiskey. “The old man Floo’d,” he said. “He’ll be late. But if I were you Lupin I would drink that.” 

Remus did and then he went out in the yard by the bins and the portal and had a cigarette. After a little while Tom came out and had one too (he smoked his own, and they were hand-rolled and unfiltered and smelled like liquid tar). “Would hardly have recognized you without,” Tom said. He indicated the old scars at Remus’s throat. “I suppose last time I saw you you were hardly more than a teenager and you were grieving.” 

Even as much as they’d avoided Diagon Alley, Remus had come in to the Leaky a lot with Sirius before the slow decline of it. But he had done everything with Sirius before the slow decline of it. The last time, he realized, most of London’s wizarding community had seen him was at the funeral. Swallow it, suck it up, this is how it’s going to be from now on, he told himself for the nth time since boarding his Muggle flight to London at JFK seventy-two hours previous. “I suppose so,” he said. 

“What’ve you been up to all these years?” 

“Dark creature consultation. Then I was a consultant with — well here they would call it an Auror squad. Dark Arts Neutralization. In Las Vegas.” 

“Jesus.” 

“It was — yeah. Then I just trapped hinkeypunks in the New York subway. And that’s what I was doing until three days ago.” 

Tom looked at him for a while, until Remus looked away. Then he said “You ought to come inside and have another whiskey.” 

“Is it that bad, what he wants to tell me.” 

“How bad is anything. I just know you won’t like it.” 

They went back inside. Tom gave him another whiskey in a shotglass this time and then a tumbler of fine scotch. “It’s all going on the old man’s bill,” he said. 

He sat at the bar and sipped the scotch and tried to read the _Prophet_ but the face and the name blared insanely like neon casino lights from every page. He wasn’t drunk enough to diffuse the shock of that forever feeling, and it shocked him that it was still a shock, to see on the third page the photographs of the house, and of the trial and of the funeral, the mugshot, in which Sirius looked drugged and calculating, and horribly determined, and unsurprised. Such a person who could bear in their face and their soul an incredible multiplicity of feeling. Eventually he gave the paper back to Tom because he didn’t want the old man (who by then was an hour late) to see him with it. Tom gave him the _Quibbler_ subsequently which blessedly bore no reference to Sirius whatsoever and instead contained lots of pseudo-intellectual debate about the nature of the unicorn blood curse. 

Dumbledore arrived seventy-five minutes late with an auspicious and battered briefcase and apologized profusely. By this time Remus had had another scotch and thought probably anything the old man said would just pass through him as though he were a sort of filter. “It’s alright,” he said, indicating the paper. “I’ve been reading.” 

“Have they reached a conclusion at last on the existence of nargles?” Dumbledore asked. He flagged Tom down from the end of the bar and requested a large gillywater. “Last I talked to Xenophilus he said he was having doubts.” 

“Doubts.” 

“Yes. I figured it would take some serious discovery for him to admit to such a thing.” 

“Well I haven’t seen anything in here yet.” 

“Read his letter from the editor, if you can decipher it.” Tom brought over Dumbledore’s gillywater and another certainly inadvisable scotch for Remus. “Unfortunately we aren’t gathered here today to discuss nargles,” said the old man, “as I’m sure you understand.” 

Remus didn’t say anything. He was beginning to regret being drunk. 

“Desperate times, as you know, call for desperate measures,” Dumbledore said. “I am taking every precaution available to me to be positively sure Hogwarts students are safe in our care when it is nearly certain they are in danger.” 

“What do you mean, in danger.” 

“Haven’t you seen the stories in the _Prophet_?” Remus didn’t answer. “It is very likely he is looking for something or someone at Hogwarts. Most have assumed and perhaps correctly that it is Harry. But — ”

So help him Remus had not yet entirely realized that by now of course James and Lily’s son was at school. 

“ — perhaps it is not. There is much of value currently under protection at Hogwarts.” 

“Why do you say very likely.” 

“The guards had reported… his mutterings.” 

Remus bit inside his lip hard. Watched the strings of dark liquid against the sides of his glass slip back into the low and trembling meniscus. 

“Which brings us, Remus, of course, to what I’ve asked you here to talk about.” 

Assassination squad, he had entertained on the plane, half asleep. Elite tracking unit of sleepless undercover manhunters questing through the forests and the moors with night vision technology, as he had once wanted to be, or rather as he had once imagined himself. The truth was they’d never sent him after Death Eaters but rather their part-human affiliates or associates and eventually, following a series of disappearances and turnings and exsanguinations, just after part-humans generally as though there were a strain in all their blood that was rotten. Which he supposed there was. 

“I’d like you to come and teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts.” 

Tom was looking at them from down the bar with this face that said, I told you you wouldn’t like it. 

“What?” 

“I’m sorry, it _is_ loud in here — ”

“I heard you. Just, what?” 

“I should think it would be pretty straightforward.” 

Remus tried a handful of words in his mouth. Eventually they organized themselves into: “How will you ever get it past the board of directors?” 

“I conveniently made sure Lucius Malfoy and his cohort didn’t show up. And that we still had quorum, so it would be admissible in the bylaws.” 

“So you’ve already — ”

“Yes. I’ve already.” 

“How am I possibly qualified?” 

“You stalked and banished a mature lethifold from a public park in Manhattan with a single Muggle casualty. You successfully consulted with DANS teams which exorcised dementors from three Las Vegas casinos, neutralized invasive kelpies in Lake Mead and parlayed with the native merpeople, successfully foiled a leprechaun _gemino_ scheme…” 

“Did you talk to my old boss.” 

“Of course. Early this summer, in fact, which should convince you, this isn’t just because of… events.” 

“You just didn’t see a need to tell me earlier?” 

“As a matter of fact Remus I sent you a great deal of correspondence on the subject.” Remus sighed and looked down the bar. “I understand why you might have been loathe to respond.” 

“Is that so.” 

“Rest assured I had no foreknowledge of that Laotian vampire cult’s propensity for — ”

“Albus,” Remus said firmly. “It’s fine. It was seven years ago.” 

“I have tried — truly, I have tried — to keep you out of harm’s way since the war. As a measure of my… appreciation for all you went through. And I have failed over and over. And as such, it appears now I have to fail again.” 

“Well what else could be at Hogwarts that he could want? That isn’t Harry?” 

Dumbledore took a sip of his gillywater. Down the bar Tom was embroiled in a tense-seeming conversation with a hag. “Does this mean you’ve accepted the position?” asked the old man at last. 

“What — no. It’s ludicrous. I’m completely unqualified.” 

“I also spoke to administrators at Brownsville Wizarding Night School and East Las Vegas Magical Community Academy. All of whom gave you glowing reviews for your work with under-resourced wizarding youth — particularly Principal Martinez at E.L.V.M.C.A., who described you as one of the most capable educators — ”

“It was community service — I’m sure Captain Frank told you about — ” 

“Yes, well, you could be forgiven, I think, for that indiscretion, on account of your… personal history…” Remus pinched the bridge of his nose. The old man gestured down the bar for another gillywater. “The point stands that teachers and administrators vouched for you and reported that your students had high levels of satisfaction in your instruction. And demonstrated their learning on… what are those horrible American standardized tests…” 

“Standard Magical Aptitude Tests. But those kids had never had a good teacher in their lives before and they had hell of low standards.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“They’d never had — they’d never done a lesson like not copying lines from a book.” He would take them out in the desert by portkey and they would make magic blinds and lie in wait to observe the behavior of chupacabra and other local cryptids. Most of them knew Remus worked sort-of-for Dark Arts Neutralization and had done something bad; sometimes he heard them whisper about it before class. He let them figure it out themselves from the papers. He thought about quitting his consulting gig with the Department and trying to teach full-time but he did some research and found he was technically ineligible as both a werewolf and a foreign national. 

The truth was there was little else he could do if he wanted to eat. There was a kind of unspoken understanding that all Dark things knew was other Dark things, even in America where the unforgivable curses were dangerously deregulated and most pure-blooded wizards voted consistently for congressional leadership whose written platform literally included denying wands and all other “magical memorabilia” to Muggle-born and part-human witches and wizards. Sometimes he remembered that when he had graduated Hogwarts he had thought he was going to go to graduate school for a degree in magical theory, and he couldn’t help but laugh. “I can’t do it,” he told Dumbledore again. “What are you going to do about — you know. The problem.” 

“The board and staff knows,” Dumbledore said, “and they voted you in anyway. I apologize for outing you, as it were, but — I figured it was better this way, than — ” 

“I can’t — I’ll go to the Shack again or something?” 

“No. Far from it. Severus can brew Wolfsbane.” 

Remus laughed, or something. It was a sharp and almost unfamiliar sort of inhuman cackle. It sounded like someone else’s, far away. 

“He helped invent it, actually.” 

“Jesus Christ. No wonder it’s like death.” 

“You’d do well to get over your — disagreements from your school days. Severus has become one of my most trusted confidants. I am only disappointed by — ” The old man pursed his lips. Whatever would come next would be a kind of clever ruse, Remus knew. “He has a difficult time, you see. With Harry.” 

“How so?” 

“You know Severus, he can be, ah, prickly…” 

“That’s one word for it.” 

James would have been — he couldn’t even imagine what James would have done. Nor what Sirius would have done. Fucking Sirius who had seemed to age six years in their hour-long silent tube ride home to Camden Town the night James had asked him to be Harry’s godfather — as though he had finally realized the whole thing were real. Remus had been jealous but then Lily had taken him aside and said, if there’s a next it’ll be yours, you know that, right? The subway was uncrowded but they were sitting close and the knee of Sirius’s black jeans had torn through showing the little freckles and scars there and Remus watched him tap his heel restlessly the way he did when he was tired and nervous. After a while the car emptied out and Sirius put his head on Remus’s shoulder. All of it gave him a sort of sick awe. It had not been three days previous that he had showed up to relieve Mary at a surveillance shift and had found her dead. Sirius had heard about the location and the corpse, and had thought it was Remus’s, and they had had very quick and desperate clutching sex in a broom closet at St. Mungo’s. And in this world now they were going to have to have some sort of metaphysical responsibility for a child. But in the end Remus had only taken that responsibility for about a year. And it seemed Sirius had never taken it at all. 

The old man was making some kind of florid excuse. Remus said, “Fine.” 

“What?” 

“I said fine. Yes. I accept.”

\--

**The Breeders, _Last Splash_**

The bulk of things he owned at that time, weight-wise (besides, of course, the metaphysical), were vinyl records, cassette tapes, and books, which were conveyed to Hogwarts directly from the Kingston Avenue tenement by a company who used an exciting sort of Portkey technology Dumbledore rambled on and on about for twenty minutes when Remus met him at the Leaky Cauldron to fill out all the paperwork. When Minerva brought him up to the rooms that would be his just after the start-of-term feast house elves had already set to unpacking all the boxes and were carefully setting things on the polished shelves in alphabetical order. Remus thanked them and told them they could leave and he would finish. They were affronted (perhaps remembering the state of his room when he had been in school) at this suggestion and left in a huff. The truth was Remus had a special system for organizing his books and records which was not alphabetical and impossible to explain. 

“What happened on the train,” said Minerva. She sat down on the desk and poured herself some sherry from the decanter Dumbledore must have filled and left there. It had been a long time since Remus had seen her and her hair had gone a little more grey but she still wore the little blue and white badge on her lapel that said _WITCHES SOVEREIGNTY NOW_. 

“Dementors came in the car.” 

“They weren’t supposed to board the train. We had a conversation with Fudge.” 

“They don’t customarily follow demands from their human handlers. That’s why wizards’ attempting to work with them is highly ineffectual at best. But you know all this.” 

“Of course. We tried to explain it to the board. But Lucius — ”

Malfoy had also seen fit to have Remus put on probation after his questionably admissible appointment. He would have to turn in lesson plans and rubrics to the board of directors on a weekly basis. 

“Dark wizards and dementors are natural allies,” Remus pointed out. 

“There’s the crux of the imperative to close Azkaban. The silver lining here is that this — recent event has brought more attention to the absurdity of the prison’s very existence. Anyway, what happened after they came in the train car?” 

“It was dark. The kids panicked, and Harry passed out. So I cast a Patronus.” 

Minerva cocked an eyebrow. 

“An incorporeal one. Obviously.” 

“A wolf is a fine Patronus and many non-lycanthropes have them.” 

Remus didn’t say anything. 

“What happened then?” 

“The kids were fine. I gave them all chocolate and explained, you know, what those things were.” 

“They clapped and cheered a lot for you. At the feast.” 

He hadn’t noticed. “I’m putting Patronuses in the curriculum for fifth year and up.” 

“I’d start with fourth,” Minerva said. “On account of circumstances. And I daresay our last Defense professor of quality quit six years ago in the face of embezzlement charges, so you might be starting from scratch, so to speak.” 

“The old man mentioned it.” 

Minerva laughed. “He doesn’t mention much, does he.” 

“Just that the last one was, what’s his name, Lochland or whatever.” 

“Gilderoy Lockhart. Did he mention that now he’s on the Permanent Spell Damage wing in St. Mungo’s?” 

“He said there was a mishap.” 

“Did he say that every mishap we’ve had here in the last two years is due to three children I think you met today?” 

Dumbledore had said, ponderously as usual, you may find Harry very… familiar to you. This had given Remus pause, and he hadn’t slept much thinking about it, because was certain Dumbledore was talking only in part about Harry’s resemblance of James or Lily. 

“It is certain that if there is any strangeness they will find it, Remus. Particularly Harry. For obvious reasons there are things Albus doesn’t necessarily want to discuss with him yet. But, also for obvious reasons, those are the things he most dearly wants to know.” 

“Does he know about Sirius?” 

“Not — the full flower of it. As I understand.” 

“Jesus.” 

“I think that may be partly why he hired you, Remus, at this — critical juncture. You’re a sort of living relic. Evidence of recent history everyone’s sort of wishfully forgotten.” 

“I haven’t.” 

“Neither have I. But you’re young.” 

“So he wants me to tell — ”

“I don’t know what he wants. But I do suspect we’ll all end up doing exactly what he wants, one way or another, before this is finished.” She gave him a wry twist of a smile. “I’ll also be getting you better sherry,” she said. “This is swill.” 

\--

If Dumbledore considered him a kind of living relic of a saint’s final passion and ecstatic death then Remus considered the castle the same. He couldn’t sleep so in his rooms he wrote the lesson plans and rubrics to share with the board. Once classes began he graded homework and listened to the Breeders’ _Last Splash_ and then he walked through the dark halls with his wand in his sleeve attentive for students truant from their dormitories (particularly attentive for the sourceless scampering feet he knew would indicate James’s invisibility cloak in action) and climbed the winding stairs to the astronomy tower where he watched out over the forest with his heart slamming in the cage of ribs dreading and wishing in equal measure for some familiar movement in the trees and the brush. Certainly it was where Sirius would be after everything. They had known the forest so well in the end they had thought about making a map of it like the one they’d done of the castle, but in seventh year they were all too ensconced in this opaque haze of sex (sometimes literal, thanks to the copious marijuana consumption courtesy Frank Longbottom) to think much about other pursuits. Except there were these moments when he realized he had to get as many N.E.W.T.s as possible in order to ever be employed as a werewolf in Britain in the late ‘70s, and it was like being dunked in ice water. And then Sirius would distract him with more blowjobs. 

To be young, he was thinking, and wanted for the first time, and with fewer scars (literal and otherwise), and with a comprehension of consequence that was entirely lacking (though, upsettingly, probably the best of all his friends’), and with a capacity for forgiveness that was still intact. In those days everything had seemed rendered in sharper color but he noticed none of it that wasn’t on Sirius. The world — which was the castle — was like a kind of crepe paper theater set through which they moved in search of each other. Nothing was real. Now he understood. 

He sat in his office and listened to the new record by Yo La Tengo, _Painful,_ and over and over again the eighth song, “I was the fool beside you I was the fool beside you for too long…” He fell asleep at his desk drunk and dreamt they were making love and then Sirius cut his stomach open with a knife to read his entrails for signs. He woke in a cold sweat and went down to the library and spelunked assorted evil texts in the restricted section (the books had been bewitched to recognize his as every professor’s magical signature, so they didn’t scream when opened) until he remembered this process was called splanchomancy. He walked the grounds at dawn and sometimes in the early mist he would try to remember something good enough to cast his Patronus corporeally to walk with him because he could feel the dementors just out of sight in the fog. The way a dog must smell something and only sense it without seeing. Strange, he thought, how you were only aware of your soul if it was in mortal danger. The ectoplasmic wolf touched his hand and its nose was cold. 

\--

On Halloween he was in his office thinking about the things he usually thought about on Halloween but worse and wishing he had anything whatsoever stronger than sherry (though Minerva had indeed brought him a very fine bottle) when he saw in the corner of his eye Harry Potter sulking by in the hallway. He got up so quickly he knocked his chair over and went to the door and asked if Harry wanted to come in for tea in what he thought (mentally kicking himself) probably seemed a little overzealous and weird, and, possibly, for a child so intuitive, and targeted and possessed, maybe even suspicious. Harry came in and Remus tried to surreptitiously fix his chair with magic. “I’ve got — actually I’ve just got Earl Grey. Is that okay?” 

“That’s fine. It’s my favorite too.” 

James had hated Earl Grey (he had been a Darjeeling guy, and he drank it black; by sixth year he was using teeth whitening charms daily) but Lily had liked it and often she would purchase fancy blends for Remus for assorted holidays: the Muggle varieties infused with lavender and wizarding brews bewitched with powerful herbs. 

“Cream and sugar?” 

“Just cream,” Harry said, “thank you.” He made like he was going to sit on one of the Navajo pattern knit poufs Remus had bought in Arizona in the eighties, but then he caught eye of Remus’s record collection stacked on the bookshelves. “Can I look through your LPs?” 

Remus wracked his brain in a sudden liquid panic he might have something in there of James’s or Sirius’s and monogrammed accordingly. But he thought he remembered most of those he had sold or destroyed. “Sure,” he said. 

“You sure have a lot.” 

“Yes, I mean, it’s easy to collect them as a wizard, when you can just magically lighten them or shrink them to move them… though it does diminish the sound quality a bit each time you do it, unfortunately. The oldest among these are a little tinny and fuzzy now.” He went over and picked out the oldest record he had to show Harry — _Songs of Leonard Cohen_. “I brought this with me to Hogwarts when I was a first year. Actually it’s my dad’s and I stole it.” He showed Harry his father’s initials inscribed on the back jacket. “Now if I put it on, it sounds like it’s fifty miles away.” 

“Oh,” Harry said. “I’m — I mean, that kind of sucks.” 

“It’s fine. I know all the songs by heart.” 

He thought perhaps he should ask Harry why he wasn’t at Hogsmeade. Or if he was feeling better after the incident on the train or any other recent dementor run-in Remus was sure he had had. Or how school was going. But Harry looked like he royally didn't want to talk about any of that. 

“What have you been listening to lately?” Remus asked. 

The kettle boiled and he went to get it. Harry had knelt by the newest records at the end of the shelf and was flipping through them with a familiar focus — summer London, heavy humidity, Sirius and James in cutoff denim shorts looking through the bargain crates on Tottenham Court Road, digging up the Beatles and the Stones, Big Star, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King — and at last he held one aloft. Nirvana’s _Nevermind_. 

“Want to put it on?” Remus asked. 

“I’m just — you have this? You’re a teacher.” 

He almost laughed. Perhaps later he would tell Harry he had a lot of records louder and scarier than that. “Of course,” he said. “This one and _Bleach_ came out when I was living in America. I almost went to go see them play live.” 

This was more shocking still. “You _didn’t_?” 

How to explain to a child, nevermind _the_ child, sometimes getting out of bed is very difficult… 

“I didn’t. I regret it.” 

“You should regret it!” He came and fetched his cup of tea from Remus’s desk. “Can we put it on?” 

“Sure, of course.” 

“Where’s your record player?” 

“We don’t need one,” Remus said. He had had a nice model for a while which he had broken in the Crown Heights tenement when he had first heard Slint’s _Spiderland_. “There’s a spell — _Rotatus sonitus._ Want to try it?” He demonstrated with the Breeders record on the desk he’d been listening to earlier. “Balance it — prop it up around the middle. There you go. Then tap it with your wand and say the spell — once it gets started you should be able to let go.” 

It stuttered a little bit but Harry steadied the record and tried the spell again and this time it worked. It started toward the end of “Lithium.” 

“Yeah, that’s the problem with this spell, it kind of starts wherever it wants. But you can just use _Reverso_ … the same spell you would use to rewind the TV or a movie.” 

Harry looked over the spinning record toward him in awe. “You can _rewind_ TV and movies?” 

Remus’s heart moved. They were supposed to have taught the kid all this stuff while James and Lily were on date weekends in the Cotswolds. “Yeah — it’s easy. Just hold your wand against — ” 

Harry did, brow tightening in concentration. When he lifted his wand the familiar opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” faded in. “Wow,” he said. 

“Volume is just like dynamics in sheet music — _piano_ and _forte_ and all that.” 

“Does it work the same with tapes?” 

“It’s _Cano sonitus_ for tapes and compact discs. But yes, everything else is the same. And to flip the side for records and tapes it’s just _Circumroto_.” Harry was watching the record spin music out of itself with a quiet fascination. “I take it then you have your own collection,” Remus said. 

“Yes — not as much as yours. But I have everything by Nirvana. And the Pixes and the Smashing Pumpkins.” 

“Have you heard any wizarding music?” 

“Only the Weird Sisters and the Hobgoblins. And only the Hobgoblins are any good.” 

Remus laughed. “Yes, good. Right answer.” 

“Ron has two of their records. He says his parents wouldn’t let him buy _Decline and Fall_. I still haven’t heard it. But do you really think it could be true — that Kurt Cobain could be a wizard?” 

Remus had been unacquainted with those rumors. “I don’t know,” he said. 

“They said he might be in _Wizarding Rock Weekly_.” 

“Be very wary of taking anything you read in that magazine as fact.” 

“But do you think it’s — ”

“I don’t know. Sometimes they make clerical errors with the Muggle-born registry. And in America, there are people who don’t believe Muggle-born witches and wizards should study in wizarding schools at all. There have been cases of records being destroyed and the like.” 

“Why?” 

“They feel threatened. You know, there are already more part-blood witches and wizards than pure-blooded ones. Those things that used to make them special are no longer just handed to them. It frightens them. You know, look at Draco Malfoy.”

“What about him?” 

“He hates you, because in his father’s day he would’ve been the most popular boy in school just by virtue of his being a Malfoy. But the thing he hates even more than that is how much smarter than him Hermione is. Have you noticed that?” 

Harry nodded. “They maybe wouldn’t’ve let her go to a wizarding school at all, in America?” 

“In some places, yes. For example, since the rise of the Sanguicrat party in the mid-fifties, the magical population of the American South has nearly halved. Not because fewer witches and wizards exist there but because fewer are being identified, schooled, trained, employed, et cetera. Racism plays a part in that too. The Sanguicrats will do anything in their power to keep black Muggle-born witches and wizards from learning about who they are. Because they’re so afraid, and so threatened and full of hate. What will happen when there’s nothing special about pure-blooded white wizards anymore? They worry they’ll be treated the same way they’ve treated the rest of us since the dawn of time.” 

He didn’t tell Harry that a key facet of the Sanguicrat platform also included internment and/or deportation (at best) of all part-humans, including werewolves. 

“That’s terrible.” 

“Yes. It’s not so different from what Voldemort wanted here. It’s just, they’ve managed to achieve it legally. At the rate they’re moving now in America there will be a Sanguicrat majority in the A.M.C. by 1998. Who knows what will happen then.” 

“What’s the A.M.C.?” 

“The American Magical Congress. I’m sorry — I lived there for six years. I forget sometimes, you know, they have different words for quite a few things.” 

“It’s my fault too. I just found out, you know, right before first year started. I don’t know anything about wizards around the world. Sometimes the Weasleys talk about politics and I have no idea what to say.” 

“That’s not your fault.” 

“It isn’t?” 

“What are you supposed to do? You have so much homework. They can’t ask you to learn world wizarding history and current events on your own. Though I do think there should be a current events course taught by anyone other than Binns. And I’ve thought that since I was at school. How do they expect you to graduate and work internationally? I mean, I guess, no one works internationally.” 

“No one but you.” 

“Minerva will have as well. Aeons ago. I think Filius too. Though likely not in America. The public wizarding schools are shit — pardon my French. And the private ones always have horrible scandals.” 

“But the music is better.” 

“Well, the wizarding music is just as bad. But I suppose, yes, the Muggle music is better… don’t you like any British bands?” 

“Not like, current bands,” Harry said evasively. He was looking over at Remus’s record shelf again investigatively squinting through his thick glasses to try and read some of the titles. “Everything that plays on Muggle radio is shite. Pardon my French.” 

He mulled over playing a Television record for Harry, or Brian Eno, Talking Heads, one of the dozens he’d listened to since 1981 only when he felt like picking mental and metaphysical scabs. But instead he said, “Have you listened to the Breeders? They’re from Ohio. They’ve made two wonderful records and one is brand new. I had it on before you got here.” 

“I haven’t.” 

“There was an interview with Cobain a little while ago, I forget what magazine. Maybe _NME_. I’ll see if I can dig it up for you. But he said they were one of his favorite bands.” Harry nodded and reached out to stop _Nevermind_ still spinning in midair. “Grab it in the middle,” Remus said, “like how you were holding it when you started it. If you just move it like an inch it’ll stop. Want another cup of tea?” 

He put the hot water on again while Harry started the Breeders record and rewound it to the beginning of “New Year.” When the song shattered and splintered guitar shards about a minute in Harry said a soft “Wow.” He was sitting cross-legged on the floor again in front of the record shelf looking early in the collection and Remus longed to go over and start pulling records out and piling them in Harry’s lap. This was your dad’s favorite (the Beatles’ white album) and this was your mom’s favorite (Heart’s _Dreamboat Annie_ ) and this was your mom’s other later favorite (Bauhaus’s _In the Flat Field_ ) and this was your dad’s guilty pleasure that he secretly loved more than anything (Boston’s self-titled 1976 LP, Meat Loaf’s _Bat Out of Hell_ , the Eagles’ _Desperado_ , etc. etc.), and this was Peter Pettigrew’s favorite ( _Wish You Were Here_ , Dire Straits, Neil Young, _Who’s Next_ , Yes, Clapton, George Harrison), and this was Sirius Black’s favorite ( _Marquee Moon_ , Led Zeppelin IV, Eno’s _Here Come the Warm Jets_ , Bowie’s _Low_ and/or _Station to Station_ , Iggy Pop’s _Lust for Life_ , _Real Life_ by Magazine, altogether the precise flavor of summer 1978, sleeping late and going out to the record store and the Muggle pub, dropping acid, fucking, assorted screaming fights of varying usefulness), and this was my favorite (the Modern Lovers, the Raincoats, Gang of Four’s _Entertainment!_ and the Fall’s _Live at the Witch Trials_ , bands called things like Scars, Wire, Wipers, Suicide, Pylon, X’s _Los Angeles_ , and the complete Talking Heads discography, “Warning Sign” off _More Songs about Buildings and Food_ over and over and over and over) and as such maybe if you listen you will grasp some of the story the old man hasn’t told you, and you’ll grasp who and what and when and why you came from in the crackling scuzzy vinyl grooves… 

Instead he sat at his desk and graded papers as Harry looked through his collection and the Breeders record played through loudly to the end. “Can I take some back to my dorm?” Harry said at last. 

“I thought you had a lot of homework to do.”

“I can listen while doing homework.” 

He was holding the Hobgoblins’ _Decline and Fall_ , Young Marble Giants’ _Colossal Youth_ , and one of Sirius’s old blues records (Howlin’ Wolf’s _Moaning at Midnight_ ) Remus had thought he had shattered in 1982. 

“Sure. Be careful with them. And you have to take two more. Just because I think you would like them.” 

He dug out the Breeders’ first album _Pod_ and Pavement’s _Slanted and Enchanted_ and walked Harry to the door. “You can come by whenever you want,” he said. Quashed the urge to grasp Harry by the shoulder in some far-belated godfatherly gesture that would no doubt be an overstep. “I don’t really do anything else but grade papers and listen to records. And I just ordered _In Utero_.” 

\--

**R.E.M., _Automatic for the People_**

Two days before the November full moon Severus came to Remus’s office with a steaming goblet of Wolfsbane. Allegedly he hadn’t enough of a supply of mothwings to brew a potion for the October iteration so Remus had been obliged to go to the shrieking shack again and at first he had doubted he would survive so weighty was the nostalgia and the dread. The last time he had been there alone was the night of the Event, fifth year. Luckily however it seemed that the creature had been awed into relative complacency by its newly familiar surroundings and Remus had woken up in the pale iron-tasting dawn with surprisingly minimal damage to himself. 

He’d had Wolfsbane once before in Vegas early in its public trials and hadn’t found the debilitating nausea and the state of feeling in gruesome detail every bone and filament of grist and inch of skin bent and twisted and reshaped like sensate clay worth the relative comfort of being able to pad around his apartment on four legs and nap on the couch through the entire middle portion. He had received further trial samples and simple questionnaires — on a scale of one to ten, rate your pain, rate your nausea, rate your satisfaction with the potion — from Southwest TC Health Services (TC being the clever, pleasant acronym for “transformation cursed”) which he had flushed down the toilet and burned, respectively. 

“I would drink it post-haste if I were you,” said Severus unpleasantly from the door. There was a hint of a scowl at the corner of his mouth. Looking into the goblet Remus’s entire being seemed to rebel fiercely. Something wet and acid chilled his throat then faded again. 

“I will,” he said, entirely not sure this was true, “thank you.” 

“Post-haste,” Severus said again. 

Though they were obliged to attend staff and board meetings together bimonthly Remus had not spent much time attempting to reconnect with Severus since his hiring. For obvious reasons as well as the fact that he had learned by the third day of classes that Snape’s teaching strategy seemed to center bullying and humiliating his own students as a means of motivating them. Remus had been disappointed but altogether unsurprised, and possessed by a renewed decades-old festering guilt over the Incident, and similarly humiliated that his actions or lack thereof had contributed to the development of Snape’s rage, which he now saw fit to take out on every non-Slytherin student in his instruction. 

Remus lifted the goblet and breathed deeply through his mouth to keep from smelling it. “Have you ever tasted this stuff?” 

“Why would I.” 

“It tastes like poison.” 

In fact, it was. According to the literature he’d received from S.T.C.H.S. it was mostly brewed from poisons that could function as sedatives when appropriately diluted. Trials were still ongoing to test if taking it regularly had significant negative impact on a werewolf’s life expectancy. All Remus could say was that it tasted like it took years off one’s life. 

“I would’ve thought you would welcome the chance to neutralize your murderous rage,” said Severus. His eye twitched just a little at “murderous rage.” 

“I do. I’m just saying.” 

Certainly this was some vengeance thing, Remus thought. Severus had to know how bad the potion was. This was a removed and abstract punishment probably years in the making. Perhaps Severus had even gleefully voted for Remus’s appointment knowing he could parlay his potionmaking skill into this eventuality. Don’t break eye contact, don’t collapse, and don’t vomit, Remus tried to tell himself. It seemed to tremble inside the goblet like quicksand and bubbling slow and thick against all the fine jewels and artful carving it seemed especially profane. Some kind of blood-slaked mud. Remus wondered as he had before how many werewolves had died in the process of the potion’s invention. 

He took a last breath and pinched his nose and drank. Severus’s black glee in the door felt like what he imagined a dementor might’ve — a swollen and evil schadenfreude joy, dark and buzzing, swallowing. He managed to set the empty goblet upright on the desk before he had to seal his hand over his mouth to keep from puking. 

It tasted evil and it seemed alive, or recently dead; drawn from something alive, injected through his veins, angry, burning, shockingly sharp. All of his guilt and twisted sympathy for Severus was bulldozed indiscriminately into a kind of leveled tortured landscape of void and aborted rage. Inasmuch as most things he had ever done in his life had felt like throwing himself against a brick wall over and over again this a pure physical distillation of the complete sensation. And, as to injure the creature in any way manifest as a dear injury to himself, it was a kind of terrible proof that he was the creature and the creature was himself and there was no organic division between his brain and its brain or his body and its body. They were a single and horrible entity. Parasite and host collapsed into one another in some age-old covenant of consummation sealed in his blood. 

“Most test subjects reported a feeling like, how did they say, like razorblades in the bloodstream and the digestive tract,” said Severus pleasantly from the door. “Which is coincidentally also what unicorn blood addicts report as the precise sensation of withdrawal. Actually the nature of my current research is on the similar chemical compounds within the two substances.” 

“Unicorn blood is healing,” Remus said. His voice was hollow and scraped in his chest. 

“Opposites can be alike,” Severus reminded him. “As you well know.” 

\--

He tried to sleep to no avail on the bathroom floor on the cold tiles naked in its terrible false fever burning hot but shivering. Everything hurt. After a few hours (two in the morning, by the clock on his desk) he stood on wobbly knees and put his bathrobe on and sat on the floor by his record collection and eventually he focused enough out of the haze to put on the first record he saw he thought he could stand, which was R.E.M.’s _Automatic for the People_. Then he lay on the floor again beside the gently spinning black disc and tried to focus into the music instead of (in spite of) anything else. A few hours previous he had entertained the possibility Severus had actually poisoned him but now it just seemed that this was the permanent state of the potion at this stage of development. The almost hilarious irony that they had found some compound which moderately neutralized the thing he hated and feared most about himself and yet this compound extended his monthly torture to three days instead of eight to twelve hours. And yet now that it existed it would be necessary if he ever wanted to work or even live. 

Swallow it, he told himself, the eternal mantra, suck it up, this is the way it’s going to be from now on. 

\--

The next day he taught class in a haze (he almost gave all his students a study hall until he remembered that Lucius Malfoy was supposed to be interrogating two students a week about their Defense experiences) and went back to his rooms and tried to sleep for a few hours until Severus brought up the second course and again stood in the doorway to watch Remus drink it. This time he dry-heaved a few times and had to hold himself up against the desk to keep from falling to the floor. “Can I bring you a ginger tonic?” Severus asked. Remus couldn’t speak but managed to shake his head. “Actually,” Snape went on gleefully, “good point. The soothing quality of ginger actually negates some of the key effects… couldn’t take the risk and have you transformed on school grounds…” 

When Severus at last left Remus went into the bathroom balancing against the wall and put his head in the cold shower drenching all his clothes and the floor. Perhaps he sat there for an hour. Reality seemed to fade back and forth, panning in and out, and he could hear students laughing in the hallways, and sometimes he thought someone was with him, touching his back and his hair and his neck, trying badly to be soothing, and he wondered when it was, where it was… 

He thought maybe he wept. He stood when he could manage it and undressed with difficulty and turned the shower off and sat on the floor again. Eventually (three AM this time) he went back out into his office and put _Automatic for the People_ back on. 

\--

On the full moon day he taught one class before he sent his Patronus for Dumbledore who came and escorted him back to his rooms. “Severus is killing me,” Remus told him when Dumbledore sat him in his chair. He was too exhausted and too sick for pleasantries. “I’m dying.” 

The old man made a face and went off to Remus’s bedroom for a glass of water into which he slipped a single Muggle alka-seltzer which foamed and fizzled dramatically. “I checked with him. You can have two of these per day during the course and they should help you some.” 

Severus, of course, probably could have told Remus that himself but had refrained. He had a sip of the fizzy water; the margin of relief was like a drop of blood in milk. “They do tell me it gets better,” Dumbledore said. “All the test subjects I had the fortune of meeting.” 

“How many — ” He held his hand over his mouth to keep from heaving. “How many fucking died.” 

“Remus,” said the old man, almost disappointedly. But then Remus fixed him and eventually he said, “Twenty-six.” 

Added to all the rest of the hurts it felt almost unbearably painful. He thought he cringed. His head slammed with his heartbeat rapid and sustained in a kind of fucked techno pulse. “It seems low,” he said with almost no sound. Even a cursory study of the less savory elements of wizarding history made it apparent that most potions development and testing sustained dozens of casualties. 

“I should say, twenty-six that we know of. In Britain. Perhaps there were more elsewhere.” 

He would learn years later the number worldwide was estimated at two hundred. 

“But that’s not what — I agree it is imperfect. And I am terribly sorry you are in such pain. But it isn’t Severus’s fault — ”

“Is it?” 

Dumbledore ignored him — “and you two would do well to patch up your differences. As I’ve said before.” 

Eventually he left and Remus tried to eat a little and sleep, neither to much avail. His bones felt reshuffling in the manner they usually did the day before but this time with a nervous and defensive weakness. Reading or grading papers made him nauseous and all music seemed to grate against his brain so he lay in silence and drifted imagining James with him or Lily and even Sirius toward the end of it when he was so exhausted he was scarcely conscious and he felt beaten into submission. Without the potion it was just a kind of vengeful ache in the few hours before and so Sirius would sit with him in the bed in the flat and sometimes they would have slow but purging and intense sex (their best, he sometimes thought, because he did a lot of thinking about their sex, or at least it was their most real) and other times they would just smoke joints and listen to ambient records or Sirius would read to him out of the _Prophet_ and make up bullshit stories to see if he could tell which ones were untrue. Then they would Apparate together wherever was safe (the shack, abandoned factories, a copse of woods) and wait together in a funny and charged and expectant silence — 

Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and he started and lashed out for his wand on the bedside table. But it was only Severus and in his hand he held the final course. His smile was triumphant in vengeance. “I can’t,” Remus said before he knew what he was saying. 

“If you don’t you’ll kill a bunch of children,” Severus said flatly as though this wouldn’t faze him at all. 

“You can take me to the shack. I don’t care.” 

“There isn’t time now. Half an hour ’til moonrise.” 

“So if I refuse to drink it?” 

“I’ll kill you. Obviously.” 

He meant it. Overwhelmingly, almost painfully, Remus hated him. 

“You’ll be delighted to know that I’ve covered your classes,” Severus went on. “And I’ll be doing the same tomorrow as you… recover.” 

It took a lot of energy not to say anything to that. The cold shock of dread filtered slowly through his raw nerves. Slowly and carefully he sat up. He had undressed to try and sleep and it seemed Severus was looking at his body with a kind of clinical fascination. Remus took the goblet from him and drained it. This time the pain was unshocking and felt almost good for all it was sharp instead of almost rounded or dull like the rest of it. He lay back down again and he could feel under his skin muscle and bone and everything alike jumping and twisting and moving to fit. “Goodbye,” he said pointedly to Severus. 

“Pardon me — I’m accustomed to observing.” 

The spark of rage was like a brief jolt or palpitation that subsided and left behind it an almost drugged numbness. This he recognized as the sensation that was the potion’s desired effect. 

“You need to leave,” Remus said. His voice was just a scratching. 

“Actually, I don’t. That’s the beauty of Wolfsbane. At least I shouldn’t have to, if it’s worked correctly.” 

“It has. I can feel it.” 

“Can you really — ”

“Severus.” 

Snape was silent and yet still he hovered. This was sacred, Remus thought inanely. The only people who had ever watched it were James and Peter and Sirius. Not even his parents had ever seen it. It was sacred to the truest and most inviolable and sanctified memory and as such he could not let Snape watch it if it was the last thing he did. 

“Please go,” he said. He couldn’t move; he could hardly open his eyes. His bones felt sharp. It would be very soon. “I know you love to torture me. I know. I don’t blame you. Everybody loves to.” 

“This is a purely scientific — ”

“Just _go_ , Severus, God damn you.” 

He heard the footsteps fading toward the door. He was holding his entire self tightly as in a fist. When he heard the door shut behind Severus he reached, achingly, impossibly, for his wand on the beside table, with which he sent every single scrap of energy left in his body in an encryption spell that would keep the door locked until he touched the knob from inside. Then it seized him. 

\--

In the morning he felt himself stretch out of it again and he lay in the bed exhausted and drifting between a blank black sleep and confused wakefulness for hours in the pale morning. Several people came by and knocked and tried the door to no avail and left again. Around nine he remembered Severus would be with his students and he tried to get up but he made it three steps before he collapsed on the floor. In another twenty minutes he had collected himself enough to get back in bed. At the very least, he thought, all this suffering well supported the collective delusion he was seriously ill. 

At last he slept, and around noon he called down to the kitchens for chicken soup and ginger tea, which was conveyed to him and which he ate in bed listening to _Automatic for the People_ again and trying to get through a few back issues of the _Prophet._ Around four PM he heard Severus leave, as requested, his students’ papers outside the door. When he felt up to it he went out and collected them thinking perhaps he could get some grading done before class the next day. The first was Hermione Granger’s: 

_Due to their resiliency, strength, and speed, werewolves are notoriously difficult to kill. Currently, International Wizarding Council (IWC) standards state that laywizards and witches should not under any circumstances approach a werewolf in its transformed state, but rather should mark the werewolf’s location and immediately summon an Auror squad or other units of magical law enforcement in order to contain the threat. The killing of a werewolf in its human state is considered murder by the IWC. However, this rule is rarely enforced, and few nations have independent laws confirming this rule._

_Many Aurors and Dark Creature professionals have theorized that the best weapon with which to kill a werewolf is a Muggle gun, especially one with magical specialization. Many spells that are used to kill werewolves mimic the action of a Muggle gun in “firing” concentrations of magical energy. The Killing Curse has had varied effect against werewolves in their transformed state, according to several studies and anecdotal reports, and should not be used in combat with a werewolf…_

\--

He had a bit of scotch and one of the over-the-counter analgesic potions he stockpiled in his desk and once it had kicked in enough he could walk around with minimal pain he gathered Hermione’s paper and went down to Severus’s office. Halfway there he had a second thought and returned to his office for the whole bottle of scotch and two fine and heavy green glass tumblers (Slytherin-esque in design) he suspected Lockhart had left there upon his removal to St. Mungo’s. His ankle hurt, because he’d rolled it in the transformation, and he thought perhaps he should confront Severus about that too. Like, you can’t tell me you have no solution to actually make this drug a) palatable and b) effectual in combating any of the terrible pain. As though those things would be on Severus’s mind as negative side effects. 

Snape was in his dungeon making notes over a hissing cauldron and he made a sound like a vocalized sneer when Remus knocked. “Come in,” he said with a mild disgust. 

“Thought I’d bring over a nightcap,” Remus said, trying to smile as mildly as was humanely possible. “You look like you could use a break.” This time Severus sneered visibly. So Remus just put the tumblers down on an obsidian table the house-elves had polished mirrorlike and poured out a measure of scotch in each. “I haven’t been down here since sixth year,” Remus said lightly. 

“Sixth year?” 

“Yes, I didn’t go after a N.E.W.T. in Potions. I was hopeless, I’m sure you remember.” 

“I do remember,” Snape said. He accepted the tumbler of scotch when Remus passed it. But he glared daggers when Remus leaned against the table. He seemed to have finally noticed the scroll of parchment paper under Remus’s arm. “I also remember — ” 

“It was fun, Severus, let’s leave it there, to come back to work after everything you put me through to fifty terribly-written papers about my own inevitable death at the hands of my students.” 

Snape looked back into the hissing cauldron with a vague disinterest. “I am — disappointed they were terribly written,” he said. 

“Yes, well, that’s what happens when the majority of these kids never attended Muggle school. How’s the scotch?” 

“Fine.” 

“It was a gift from the old man,” Remus lied. 

Snape’s mouth twisted a little. Remus wondered if he had ever felt a single emotion but jealousy. 

“Don’t you see all of this is his master plan,” Remus said, because he wanted to say something else considerably worse. “This is what he needs you doing and Defense is what he needs me doing.” 

“It’s almost charming Lupin that you believe he hired you for any reason other than the obvious. Which is that he needs to keep the closest eye on you he can manage after — ” 

“Whatever. I’m the wrong person for you to take this out on is all I’m saying. There’s only one reason you would take it out on me and I thought bygones were bygones after all that’s happened in the interim.” 

“You’re a danger to this school and these students. In more ways than one.” 

“How’s that.” 

“Well besides the obvious I took the liberty of perusing your file from Las Vegas D.A.N.S.” He spelled it out rather than use the acronym like Americans did. “You were given the community service assignment that makes you even remotely qualified for this position as a punitive measure for assaulting an officer.” 

“Well, yes.” 

“So you admit it.” 

“Why would I deny it when you said you read the file.” 

Snape ignored him. “He was hospitalized. Officer — ”

“Morris. Yes.” 

“Don’t you have anything to say for — ”

“No. I don’t regret it. He was fine in the end and I, you know, discovered my passion for teaching.” 

Snape pursed his lips which for him had always seemed like an undertaking of the entire face. “I see you haven’t changed,” he said flatly. “Since school. The things you can find it within yourself to overlook.” 

He couldn’t argue with it but he didn’t think Severus would understand it was altogether for a far different reason now. 

“I swore an oath to protect this school from internal and external foes,” said Severus. “That would include internal agents assisting external foes. Need I remind you it’s the same oath you swore.” 

“For the life of me I can’t figure out why you would think I would help him.” 

“You forgave him before.” 

“Yes, well, it was only me that got hurt then. And I guess you — but just your pride.” 

“I nearly died.”

“No, you didn’t.” 

“It was a dry run for his later murders. That’s what was said at trial.” 

“He said that?” 

“ _He_ didn’t say much at all. Don’t you know?” 

Remus didn’t know. He’d never read the stories about it in the _Prophet_ nor the transcript when it was made publicly available. 

“I was almost sorry for you then,” said Snape flatly. 

Remus got up; his knees cracked. The old ache, the oldest, was bone-cold, bit deep. “You’re not subbing my class again,” he said. 

Snape was quiet for a moment, and his lips tightened chalky white in his sallow face. The potion in his cauldron had turned a sickly matte beige. At last he said, “You do realize the potion I’m providing you with — ”

“Feel free to explain to the old man why you’re withholding it from me. I don’t mind it. I’m sure it’s already taken years off my life.” He collected the scotch and the two tumblers, one of them from Snape’s hand; he hadn’t drunk more than a sip. “I’m leaving Hermione’s paper with you,” Remus said. “You might use it to set the curve if hell ever freezes over and you teach Defense yourself.” 

\--

The thing that had happened in Vegas was that Remus had gone with Officer Morris and a handful of others on a raid of a werewolf compound whose leaders were suspected of turning children, harboring radicalized fugitives, and conspiring to commit some kind of terrorist act or another against the Sanguicrat political majority who operated a Southwestern regional office out of Henderson. Remus had been assigned to tag along as the department’s official Magical Beast and Being Consultant as a kind of sensitivity witness or general werewolf liaison, both of which were his least favorite things to be and yet his customary assignments within LVDANS. In fact he had attempted before the raid to make inroads diplomatically with members of this compound several times and had been rebuffed. The decision to make a police strike had come under pressure after the home of a local Sanguicrat politician out near Sloan Canyon had allegedly been magically attacked, though later they would learn this had been a hoax. 

Remus went in with the second phalanx so his was not the group to have found the corpses. There were a few of them and small and they would later learn they had died of complications (blood loss, bone shards embedded in hearts and lungs) from botched turnings. With the bodies was a woman who was perhaps Remus’s age (twenty-eight) and Morris had grabbed her by the shoulder and he had his wand leveled between her eyes and he was shouting something and shaking her. She had her hands up and she was crying and she was trying to say something back Remus couldn’t hear. He ran to them and in his memory the running took forever and ever and he was still so so very far away when he heard Morris say the words and she crumpled to the ground. 

They learned later she had indeed been a werewolf and her name had been Vanessa Tucker. She was at the compound as a captive of her husband who had been one of the masters of the pack. She had been tasked to care for the children they attempted to turn, often to little avail. It was indisputable that she had never turned anyone herself on account of the fact that a cultish manifesto had been found on-premises in which it was stated that werewolves turned by female masters were ineligible to join the group. Despite this Officer Morris’s lawyer tried to argue it was likely she could have orchestrated the attack on the politician’s house, but this was struck down relatively quickly once the local wizarding paper discovered the attack had all along been a scam. And regardless of even that Morris was quickly acquitted because it was a Sanguicrat county and the victim was a werewolf and photographs of dead children had been presented to the jury and their weeping parents were in the courtroom. Remus had sat with them on the day he had attended and wondered as he often did about what these parents would be doing had their children survived. It was likely they would still be weeping. Surreptitiously they would ask assorted friends and neighbors about their options and one day at last they would send away for special literature about part-human residential schools. 

The day after the acquittal Remus went into the precinct to talk with his boss about another matter entirely. He went to the kitchen for coffee and Morris was there. “Lupin,” he said brightly. 

“Congrats, Tony,” Remus said, kind of tightly. 

There was no half and half in the fridge, and there was milk, but it was expired. But anyway he kept looking into the fridge kind of gazing into the stained and condensating back wall willing Morris to go away. 

“The missus and I are heading on vacation tomorrow,” Morris said. “Taking the kids to the ranch. Maybe get some hunting in.” 

“Sounds great.” 

“Gotta do something with my bonus, am I right?” 

“Bonus?” 

“Yeah, sixty doubloons and two weeks paid leave. Something about all that stress in the courtroom.” 

“Stress,” Remus said. “In the courtroom.” 

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” 

He felt that thing boiling bubbling up and for a second of extreme panic he thought maybe it would just happen here maybe it would just rip up through his gut like a knife and tear him open here on the precinct kitchen floor and he would welcome it. He would. 

“Anyway have a good one Lupin,” Morris said. And he went out through the swinging door. 

Remus got up from the floor by the fridge and his knees cracked. He poured himself the last of the coffee and then he took the mug and the empty glass pot back out into the big room and he went to Morris’s desk where he had all his paperwork fanned out in messy piles and moving waving photographs of his two sons. He was sitting in his red swivel chair laughing and laughing with the other guys and Remus broke the glass coffeepot over his big bald head. Then he upended the mug of coffee over his desk. He had managed to drag half Morris’s paperwork into the mess when he was tackled by about three other guys and the captain came out from the office banging on the cinderblock walls with a truncheon screaming about brotherhood and decorum. 

\--

When he returned from the dungeon he lay awake in the aching nothing bed and wondered what kind of dark magic Sirius must know now. Certainly he would know how to create Inferi and gollums, probably assorted mechanical and animal possessions, and all the good blood magic, the very dangerous variety of scrying where you were always in danger of literally losing your mind, the unforgivable three and assorted other curses that should also have been considered similarly (and were in most developed nations), undetectable and slow-acting poisons, tenuous control of bodies of water, earthworking and terramancy, resonance channeling, staged hauntings, vivisection, hepatomancy, splanchomancy, abacomancy, halomancy, necromancy, etc. etc. 

He wondered which of these Sirius had used to keep his mind and his magic in the prison and he wondered which he had used to break free from a stronghold from which no wizard had ever escaped. He wondered which Sirius had known even while they lived together in a four-hundred-square-foot flat possessed by cockroaches and at least one ghoul. Which he had employed in the bathroom or at the kitchen table whilst Remus was away or sleeping. From whom he had learnt them and under what circumstance. 

Like maybe in some alternate universe he would have woken up in the night and gone in the living room and seen Sirius throw the shoulder bone of a lamb in the fire so as to read the cracks. And then he would have known. Sometimes he thought even if he had known he wouldn’t’ve done anything. _The things you can find it within yourself to overlook_ , as Severus had said. How much he would have ignored to be loved beyond even all the foolish bullshit he had already filed away: Sirius’s cruelty and impatience and arrogance, suspicion, gaping insecurity; he talked too quickly, he never washed dishes and he took forever to get dressed, he didn’t understand how money worked, and he didn’t understand sacrifice or selflessness, and he had the mother of all persecution complexes, and he thought his own feelings were the biggest and truest and most real feelings ever felt by anybody. And he did not consider it his responsibility to care about anybody else’s. 

He loved so much. Nothing was larger than his love. It was in Remus’s own blood like any other sickness. It was like magic. 

\--

**PJ Harvey, _Rid of Me_**

After the second round of Wolfsbane he decided he was going to invent an alternative or concretely prove the substance not only physically but also morally reprehensible in a public forum just to spite Severus. As he had failed sixth year potions to such an extent that he had gotten special clearance to drop the class seventh year he figured the second option was far more probable. As such he had reluctantly owled Southwestern TC Health Services in search of whatever recipes American werewolves and their “advocates” were using. It was enshrined in international wizarding law that potions recipes were supposed to be public domain but it seemed the pressures of late capitalism precluded these regulations; S.T.C.H.S. sent back a kind but firm letter stipulating that they were very sorry but only provided potions recipes to current patients, one of which, they reminded him, Remus had not been since 1988 when he had refused to respond to repeated requests for feedback. 

In the end he got the recipe through a fellow consultant he’d worked with at L.V.D.A.N.S. — Natasha Harpy-Ross, a magical archeologist, who had been hired by the department as an advisor when they had shut down a Muggle construction project after several deaths associated with cursed burial sites. Natasha’s partner Clio worked in far northern Canada and was on staff at a werewolf services nonprofit in Yellowknife. _I’ve enclosed two recipes_ , Clio wrote in a handwritten letter accompanying six pages of typewritten instructions. _The first one (with NTWS stamped across it) is the recipe we use when we brew Wolfsbane in-house. It’s been adapted quite a bit from the standard with ingredients and advisory from locals and is a little less abrasive and painful according to my patients. These ingredients are probably going to be impossible for you to get but please let me know if I can express owl any. And the second recipe (on B.B.B.A. stationary) is the standard… every few months we get a new standard recipe based on refinement, continued research etc. (allegedly), and we have to have some freshly brewed at all times in case the provincial health inspector comes around. Though we don’t use it here at all and haven’t since we invented our version._

_Natasha said you are suspicious about the potion you are taking and described some of your symptoms but I don’t think you are being sabotaged. At least, no more than any other werewolf who takes the standard Wolfsbane is being sabotaged. You’ve reported customary symptoms for the normal brew. I don’t think you should be suspicious of the person who is brewing this for you but rather of the standard potion itself. Are you on good relations with this person and can you share our recipe with them?_

_I wish you all the best and good health, Clio H-R_

There was no way Snape would brew Clio’s recipe for him, Remus thought. Not only because easing human suffering just wasn’t Snape’s M.O. — it included ingredients he doubted even Severus had ever heard of. Marsh woundwort, pearly everlasting, boiled mash of arrowhead stems… At the end of the recipe was a spell series recited over the top of the boiling cauldron periodically as it steeped; Clio had recorded it in the original indigenous language as well as a Latinate approximation which, she wrote, “seems to work.” 

Next he looked at the standard recipe, which was printed on finer paper emblazoned with a colorful seal in which a werewolf howled at the moon and a mer-person swam gracefully, set against a vivid red maple leaf. _Canadian Wizarding Parliament: Bureau of Beast and Being Affairs_ , read the text set beneath. Then followed, without introduction, the body of the recipe. The first ingredient, represented in the highest volume besides water (for dilution) and dragon’s blood (a thickening agent) was aconite, with the stipulation: _two full plants of any toxic genus, as freshly harvested as is possible._

Such a dose would kill even a human, especially when coupled with the second most prevalent active ingredient by volume, white baneberry, a common and fast-acting poison known for sedating cardiac muscles. Other poisons — some even deadlier — were represented in smaller measures. All of it was supposedly offset by the dilution and a hearty addition of charcoal and a few other antidotes. 

Since he had started taking it he had felt creaky and slow like a piece of old bewitched furniture and sometimes his vision turned black when he stood up too quickly. He woke up in the night when his heart skipped breathlessly or otherwise he woke in a shocking seeming fever that passed quickly. Clio’s letter seemed to confirm it wasn’t necessarily Severus who was trying to kill him but rather something larger and still more horrible to which Snape was simply a very willing contributor. 

He went into the library by night digging through the back catalog of periodicals Pince kept in cardboard boxes in a glorified broom closet, reading back to the mid-eighties in such journals as _Review of Part-Human Affairs_ , _Beast and Being Quarterly_ , _Lycanthropy Theory Review_ (unaccredited and clearly photocopied in a Muggle shop), _Discoveries in Transformation Curse Theory_ , _A Potionmaker’s Journal_ , et cetera in search of any history or existing scholarly work. The later journals included advertisements for Wolfsbane and/or calls for werewolves to participate in testing thereof — “with a 100 galleon per month stipend!” — and in the May-June 1983 issue of _Potionmaker’s Journal_ there was a chilling RFP: _In the Ministry of Magic of Great Britain’s Potions Development Bureau we have had interesting successes in developing a potion with aconite to prevent some elements of lycanthropic transubstantiation_ … 

There was a solid chance, Remus thought grimly as he copied the page with a _gemino_ spell, that “interesting successes” simply meant “fewer deaths than expected.” Certainly Snape had applied gleefully with a proposal that had referenced his zeal for scientific progress at whatever cost. 

The other journals didn’t reference the development of the potion at all (its first appearance in any of the noted part-human studies journals was in a “fast facts” column in the October 1986 issue of _RPHA_ ) though upon the beginning of the public phase of subject testing in April 1987 there had been a slate of poorly-written think-pieces straddling either side of the aisle, from desperate appeals to common decency to treatises of numb acceptance to glowing praise of “selfless” potions developers and “martyred” collateral damage. He copied them all, though most of them wound up burnt to ether on the hotplate in his rooms sometime around the four AM hour as he brewed an nth cup of coffee. 

He decided to pursue a different entry point and spent more late nights in the library sitting on one of the antique dragon’s-foot stools in dusty sections untrafficked but for horny seventh years seeking erotic solitude, perusing assorted dry and sometimes actively decaying or disruptively mothbitten history tomes in which were inscribed stories of part-human exterminations and genocides committed in any number of atrocious ways: poisoning, gruesome warfare, mass drowning, mass executions, entrapment and immolation, starvation by siege, et cetera et cetera. 

How to gather and reconcile all this knowledge and not want to walk in the woods and never come out. To tear oneself to innumerable scattered and contagious shreds. To wander out onto the grounds into the frozen vaporous clutches of the nearest dementor and demand instantaneous lobotomy, as Ginsberg would have said. 

A few weeks later (two more full moons and Wolfsbane courses in, weak in the knees, dizzy when he stood, appetite absolutely fried) at two in the morning he was making some final tweaks to his notes and outline when there was a confident rapping upon the door. He pulled the record he had been listening to — PJ Harvey’s _Rid of Me_ — out of its midair rotation and tried to hide all the research he could under his seventh years’ dismal papers on identification and banishment of lethifolds. 

In the hallway, raising his fist to rap upon the door again, was the old man, clothed resplendently in an ostentatious dressing gown. Any uncertainty Remus may have had about any reason Dumbledore would come his rooms in the middle of the night was rapidly dispelled when the old man swept past him into his office without an invitation. In his sage-smelling wake Remus slammed the door not entirely accidentally. 

“It is certainly late,” said Dumbledore bluntly, surveying the room, “for someone who is teaching a full day of Defense Against the Dark Arts classes tomorrow. Whilst under a strict probation coming directly from the board of directors.” 

“I’ve a lot of papers to grade. You really ought to mandate some kind of Muggle education for enrollment as these students’ grammar — ” 

The old man fixed him and he stopped. Something had gone wrong — it was in the sharp blue eyes. In the silence Remus could hear bustling and frightened movement in the corridors. The old man went to the door to Remus’s bedroom and his hand strayed toward his wand in the pocket of his dressing gown. 

“He’s not in there,” Remus said. He sat in his desk chair. The tendril of omnipresent nausea sourced from the Wolfsbane courses seemed to wind up and around his ribs like invasive ivy. 

“There was a break-in,” the old man said, “at Gryffindor tower, tonight, just earlier. Forgive me if I leave no stone unturned.” 

He went into the bedroom drawing his wand from his pocket. Remus was reaching under his desk for the scotch but the old man came out again quickly. It took him a moment to realize perhaps the sensation he was feeling was one of betrayal. 

“No one was hurt?” 

“No one — some bed curtains.” 

Dumbledore leant over the desk and shifted some of the students’ papers showing a corner of one of pages Remus had copied in the library. _— 1527, the stronghold was sieged with flaming tar, killing every vampire inside —_

“You understand it’s not that I don’t trust you.” 

“It’s that other parties don’t.” 

Dumbledore eyed him. “ _Other parties_ don’t understand — the full flower of the situation at hand.” 

Snape probably did, Remus realized with a chill. 

“I know,” Dumbledore went on, “I know, in my heart, Remus, if you knew anything — this is after all the second time he has made it into this castle. Which is warded, need I remind you, to such an extent that two thirds of the spells are classified by the Ministry. And which is surrounded by creatures who know the precise shape and sensation of his soul. And I know in my heart that if you knew anything that might explain how this could be possible, that you would tell me — no. I know that you would have told me when you agreed to come teach here or even before. In my office on that dark day you would have told me.” 

“You're right,” Remus said. “I would have told you. But there’s nothing. Can you imagine what dark magic he must have — ”

“Yes, yes I can indeed.” 

Sometimes he found he had nearly convinced himself this lie was true. That Sirius had not learned the Animagus transformation and that all the sacred memory of that truth was a dream or some other manufactured fiction. There were dark ways to meddle with the memory and the mind, he understood. When he couldn’t convince himself of this the guilt felt viscous and suffocating and he was certain every death when it inevitably occurred would be his own fault. Though, evidently, also guilt-inducingly, this thought never seemed to motivate him quite enough to tell Dumbledore. 

“I wish he were dead,” Remus went on. He wasn’t sure if this was a lie. “If he came in here I would kill him. And you know I have the most cause of anyone still alive aside from Harry. Otherwise you wouldn’t’ve hired me.” 

Dumbledore paused for a moment. If it happened again there would be a round of Veritaserum coming, Remus knew. “Don’t sell yourself short,” the old man said finally. He shifted the papers on Remus’s desk again; something about this felt uncomfortably intimate. “Are you finally going to publish something?” 

“Don’t you have other dusty corners to attend to?” 

“Nonsense, Minerva is conducting a full sweep now… can’t I speak with my Defense professor about his scholarly pursuits?” 

“I thought you said I was staying up too late.” 

“Well know that I know it’s for academic reasons…” He lifted a page and his expression seemed to sour as he read it. Remus knew from the pictures fuzzily visible through the thin paper it was the rather dire piece on werewolf pelt collection as wizarding status symbol in the early colonization of the American West. Dumbledore skimmed it and put it back on Remus’s desk under a few student papers, as though to hide it from view. “I just wonder what exactly — those pursuits might be,” he said, attempting lightness. 

“Wolfsbane seems to me another piece of the assimilation or extermination policy the wizarding mainstream has foisted upon part-humans since about 5000 BC, according to my research — ”

“Still hung up on that, are you?” 

He could not deny this stung. “So would you be if you were taking it every month.” 

“I assure you, Severus — ”

“It isn’t about Severus — it’s, like one tiny thread in the tapestry of it is about Severus. I need to prove that. It doesn’t matter if — any interpersonal history between us sort of negates the possibility of my gleaning anything admissible from my personal experience, if you know what I mean…” 

“Of course. I just wonder if this is where you should be investing your considerable talents. I just read this fabulous paper in _Journal of Dark Creatures_ about bog-dweller convergent evolution and I thought, we could use much more scholarship of this caliber in our historic publications.” 

This is my life, Remus wanted to say, did not say; this is an act of self-defense, I am doing this so I might live. “Interesting,” he said instead. 

“It just seems — and pardon me. I do hope this isn’t too inappropriate. I do worry for you. And I worry it was unfair of me to give you so much weight to carry, as it were, what with all… this.” 

“It isn’t too much weight — not at all.” 

“I worry you’ll find that, well, it seems like it isn’t too much until it is… there’s no middle ground. And in that moment, when it becomes too much, all of a sudden — there is a profound sort of vulnerability in that moment. Which is something I know you on many levels cannot afford.” 

“This is — this does seem inappropriate, Albus.” 

“Forgive me. I’ve seen too many young teachers burn out.” As though any of this conversation had been in any way about that. “There is no need to send your considerable mental energy and creative inquiry down such a path at an already stressful time. I’m asking you to reconsider your research pursuits for your own mental health.” 

“My mental health.” 

“Yes, of course.” 

It was almost hilarious. As though the old man had ever for one second in the harrowing past worried about Remus’s mental health. Where were you, he wanted to say, in the war days, in the time after, when it was your pursuits I was following to my own dissolution? 

\--

Just before dawn he woke in the night from fitful dreams suddenly certain he wasn’t alone. It didn’t sound like only his breath in the room and the draught through the window was colder as though someone had winnowed it open another creaky inch. As in the faded ur-memory which was the beginning and the end of all things. 

Sirius had used to come home late from surveillance shifts or reconnaissance missions or whatnot and Remus would hear him in the kitchen digging out something to eat from the fridge or the cabinets and especially toward the end of it he would feign sleep even when Sirius opened the bedroom door loudly and it was abundantly clear he wanted to Talk or something. He would come sit on the edge of the bed and he would touch Remus’s belly and his lowest rib (and his hands were cold), as in ritual preparation for whatever renewed transformative violation. It had always seemed to Remus almost apologetic or like some superstitious and healing approximation of the Sign of the Cross, as though he was contemplating the nature of evil, or of suffering. He would be looking unfocusedly across the room into their pile of laundry on the floor and Remus would think about saying something softly like, take your boots off and come lie down. Of course he knew Remus was awake but even if Remus had acted awake all he would have done was sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pile of laundry on the floor and Remus would say, take your boots off and come lie down, and Sirius would stand up and go back in the kitchen or smoke cigarettes on the fire escape and he would come in again at dawn when Remus would get up to make coffee and toast and put a record on and think about slamming his head in a door. It should have been horribly apparent in retrospect.

Someone sat on the edge of the bed. He was certain. He kept his breath even — he could feel his heartbeat in his shirt. The weight on the edge of the mattress and the soft white moon even through his closed eyes. 

He couldn’t remember the night he’d met the first monster who had climbed in through his bedroom window though there had been a period in his early twenties when he was sort of obsessed with trying, mostly with a series of psychedelic drugs and spells designed for dementia patients to spur quashed memories. He had never touched it. It seemed his animal mind was smarter. Certainly it had been almost like this — a presence on the end of the bed. Probably he thought it was a dream or maybe he had thought one of his parents had come in to check on him as they sometimes did since he had had whooping cough when he was three. He pretended he was asleep. Then the movement — 

The touch — like a touch. The wind through the open window. An open hand against his ribs and another at his throat — 

He opened his eyes shockingly into the room which was empty. Then he closed them again. 

— and another at his throat. The thumb pressed up into his pulse. Sirius had never done this to hurt him and he had never tightened his hand much more than that although Remus had sometimes thought about asking him to. They would undress each other in the darkness reaching as if to discern by feeling that the other truly was still there. It would be different now because there would be so much less of both of them.. In Remus’s mind Sirius probably looked the same as he always had but sharper and less. Like everything between his skin and bone had been sucked away as by some overzealous plastic surgeon out of Hades and his soul had kind of spoiled and fermented like the innards of a rotten fruit. And certainly he himself was less. Perhaps not physically; in that way he was probably about the same. More ruined skin. But the rest of him was less. 

It would be much like it had been, kind of rushed and desperate, clutching, awkward, every moment weighted with a kind of endling-ness; soon it would be over, and Sirius would probably hurt him by accident (ragged fingernails, callused clawing hands), but he wouldn’t care. Profoundly silent. 

Perhaps they would make love how they had on the full moon mornings when he woke, aching, hollow, in the narrow bed, desperately yearning, burning; they fumbled out of their clothes, and it was like a dream. Usually they put records on during sex but there wasn’t time. He reached back and guided Sirius by the hip as he pushed inside and Sirius’s teeth were in his shoulder Sirius’s hands splayed across his chest and low between his hips holding him still. Holding. His own breath was sharp and starved. Sirius pulled out and fucked back inside him again slow and steady and drove all the breath out of him in a quiet sound and he could feel Sirius against his skin (inside him) shiver at the sound of it. 

They were still in most of their clothes pushed up or tucked down sweat-damp and uncomfortably twisted and between them something molten that was not just sex stirred and grew elastic and blood-hot like blown glass. 

Sometimes he would reach between his own legs to feel Sirius fuck in and out of him and sometimes afterward Sirius would hold him open with his thumbs just to breathe over him there and watch and some other times Sirius would just eat him out until he cried or he would let Sirius fuck his mouth or between his thighs or they would just lie together in the bed kissing and kissing for hours. 

He had imagined this for years as a kind of momentary reprieve and reminder of the impossible warmth of physical intimacy with someone whose entire soul you understood telepathically before he actualized his second most dominant fantasy which was killing Sirius himself in some understated and almost peaceful way before walking into the forest to die like an old dog. Now he thought maybe they would lie together in the bed just for ten minutes in the familiar still heart-beating silence before he did it. And Sirius, he thought, certainly, after so long, after so much, and after all that running, Sirius would allow him to. 

\--

He was leaving breakfast that day feeling spread thin over burnt toast and already two minutes late to his first class (thankfully, seventh years, who could easily entertain themselves with their research were he not present) when Snape cornered him in an alcove directly outside the great hall like an outsize greasy bat or otherwise a rather pathetic lethifold. “I know what you’re up to,” he hissed. He was of a height with Remus so his attempt at imposing hovering probably did not have the same impact it had on his youngest students. 

Naively Remus assumed perhaps Dumbledore had told Snape about the research and steeled himself for some bad-natured academic rivalry. But of course Severus had larger fish to fry. “I cannot prove it yet,” he said, or he more like spit, “but when I can — you will rue the day.”

“You’ll never prove it. Because it isn’t true.” 

Snape ignored that. “I’ve always seen through you,” he went on. “Since school. You only ever had friends at all because of your remarkable facility with lying and a certain moral bankruptcy brought on by your victim complex. So I know you have no mechanism to distinguish between good and evil. And I also know there’s no one you won’t lie to. Not even Dumbledore.” 

At least I had friends, Remus almost said. 

“When I discover the exact nature of your collusion I will have you shipped directly to Azkaban,” Snape continued. “Perhaps when the dementors catch him Black will even corroborate my story. That is, if they give him any time before — ” 

“I’ve got to get to class, Severus,” Remus told him evenly. “So do you, I think.” 

He extracted himself from the alcove and straightened his robes. There was a fleck of croissant pastry at the lapel which he brushed away. If he had doubted it before now it was certain that if Sirius broke in again the next course of Wolfsbane would be poisoned at the very least with Veritaserum. You’re a monster, he wanted to tell Severus; you feed on misery. You’re your very own soul-devouring manifestation of doom in a single man and the substance of your very blood is bitterness. 

“We’re not so different,” he said instead. “Have you thought about that?” 

Snape’s face soured. “I’ve had enough of — your cryptic introspection — ”

“It’s very direct in fact.” 

“It’s your dismal attempt at — ”

“Severus, I’m going to class.” He backed away down the hallway showing the palms of his hands as one was supposed to do for a hippogriff or some other ridiculous creature he’d forgotten. “Come to my office if you want to share more conspiracy theories or else the students will talk.” 

\--

**Nirvana, _In Utero_**

He woke in the morning as had become routine: when the stately grey owl that carried the _Prophet_ rapped steadily upon the window. And he continued with the day as had become routine: he left the paper face-down on the desk while he made coffee and tried to think about anything else for a while. If he had had anxious dreams he would have a cigarette, and then he would steel himself and look at the front page of the paper. Nine times out of ten it was Sirius’s 1981 mugshot and the tenth time it was a grim photograph of Melissa Floyd, the minority leader of the Sanguicrat party in the American Magical Congress, who was immensely popular with conservative factions in the UK. She was skeletally thin and so deathly pale she resembled a vampire, except her hair was so light blonde as to be white, and she had called many times for all American vampires to be staked. 

On normal days he would skim and stagger through the national and international sections in his office and take the marginally less dire inserts — Muggle News, Business, Arts and Culture, Sports, Health and Science — down to breakfast to read over eggs and further coffee. Customarily he found despite the shock tactic of the photograph on the first page more often than not the _Prophet_ had no new news about neither Sirius’s motivations or whereabouts nor whatever Melissa Floyd was plotting. This didn’t necessarily mean there _was_ no new news, Remus understood — even when Sirius had broken into the castle it hadn’t been reported in the _Prophet_ as Dumbledore had somehow managed (possibly through clever employment of memory charms) to keep the whole incident from the board’s knowledge. 

Today, however, there was indeed new news and the editors had signaled this with a gaudy, flashy headline that blared _BREAKING NEWS!_ in shifting colors and runic languages and seemed to throw effervescent sparks. Remus’s first thought was that the Sanguicrats had taken majority in the AMC. But below the text was a picture of Sirius — a new and different one, from the late seventies. It must have been in the collection of one of the Order’s dead; Remus knew their belongings more often than not had been seized by the Ministry if they had had no wills, which of course toward the beginning few of them had. In this photograph Sirius was sitting on an old and fraying couch holding a beer and explosively he laughed. He covered his eyes with his hand and in the dregs of the laughter his shoulders jumped against his grey t-shirt. He looked so like some living manifestation of every sanctified and precious memory of the uncertain Before that Remus quickly folded the image over to avoid looking at it. 

_SIRIUS BLACK: FUDGE AUTHORIZES ANIMECTOMY  
_ _Dementors instructed to perform the Kiss on sight_

His heart jumped. He unfolded the paper to look at the photograph again and eventually he rested his temple in his palm. 

There might be an exception, he thought, or there should be, for such strange souls… such magical souls that could be so known and so unknown. When they took it did they devour it and destroy it forever? Or could it be coughed back up into a vial or something and corked up and preserved like a prophesy? 

He might do the research, he thought; he might discover a way it could be done. Not that dementors would ever condescend to do it even if it were possible. It would be like taking food out of their hands. 

The laughter — the holy laughter. All of it they had shared. It was like watching a film. The movement of his face. Across that very room in that photograph in that history Remus had probably been there also laughing about whatever there was to laugh about in those days which was usually the bets they were placing on whoever would die next or some other brutal gallows joke which seemed very funny because there was nothing else. They didn’t laugh much when they were alone. He remembered listening to the dismal atmospheric noir of the first four minutes of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” over and over again in the kitchen whilst frying eggs in such a hypnotized and exhausted trance they usually burned. And then they had gathered together and laughed. He wondered if by the time this photograph was taken Sirius had already known what his task would be and that he would carry it out in two years’ time and what would come of it. 

What would they do afterwards with his body, Remus wondered, and it chilled him such that he folded the paper over again. He stared at the headline and the lede for so long the bewitched headline imprinted a flare of sparking color upon his vision when he looked up and around the office again. 

\--

His soul. It felt kind of liquid in the dark in the memory and almost bright. He had been certain he knew every recess. Every separate horror that had carved a still and secret place away in the seams of it. Sometimes he would wake and he would know beyond a shadow of any doubt they had been in the same dream. It would happen like this even after but then the dreams were black and they felt so viscous he could not shake them upon waking. Like tar — a liquid depth containing rotted skeletal history. It had been why he started taking more drugs. 

He had never met such a brilliant person in his life. A brilliant shining person. Like in the darkest hour of the night there was a light coming from this person. From his soul. Understanding and knowledge passed between them without being vocalized. Between them was a kind of telepathic airspace. Which was not to say it was ever easy. There had been weeks and months Remus had hated him even before. He would sit in the bathtub and smoke cigarettes and he could feel the kind of opposing magnetic field that was Sirius on the other side of the locked door leaning his forehead and his fist against it saying, I didn’t mean — you know what I meant. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s not — you know I love you. It’s not us — it’s not you. It’s me. It’s the war. 

[ It’s me, I am the war, the war is in me, as it is in you, amen. ] 

His soul. The big black dumb dog who chased tennis balls and sticks and slobbered and shed on everything and bounded around him gleefully in the wide green fields. 

\--

After class that day he attempted to grade papers in a sort of haze until eventually (it was late, by the darkness in the window; long after dinner, and he hadn’t eaten) he looked up to see Harry standing in the open door. 

Initially he thought he had forgotten something. “Were we supposed to — ” 

“No,” Harry said, “no, not that, I just.” 

But he didn’t say anything more and he came in and sat down on one of the Navajo poufs. After a moment in a very still and pure silence Remus said, nervously, “Would you like to pick out a record to put on or something? And I think I have some Butterbeer.” 

His heart had picked up and was pounding a little. He was beginning to suspect Harry had come to confront him. Perhaps Snape had said something — but Harry knew better than to take that seriously. Otherwise the castle had a lot of secrets it revealed selectively. He imagined some demonic and encyclopedic Room of Requirement full of all the Answers… He had the Butterbeers hidden under his desk in an air conditioning charm (along with quite a bit of stronger stuff) and he opened two and passed one across the table. “What’s on your mind,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant about it. 

“What’s under a dementor’s hood?” Harry asked. 

He had thought he would be asked to describe the exact nature of some horrible historical Event and paused for a second, shocked. “Well, this is actually really interesting and a matter of some debate. We don’t know because you can’t really get close enough to one to see. Certainly they wouldn’t let you… touch them. I don’t think anyone would want to. And they also eat their dead.” 

“What!” 

“They sort of manifest, rather than being born or something, in a place where evil things have happened. And it seems only starvation can kill them. At least, if we can even define their typical state as life.” 

“But how do you know that they eat each other?”

“First wizards just thought that if they didn’t have enough human memories and souls to feed off they would just sort of poof out of existence. But there was an observational study done with special bewitched cameras in a dementor colony in the late eighties. The researchers learned that they have physical form enough to die, as we understand death. And they learned what happens to them, when they die. They had plans to extract the corpse for analysis but, you know…” 

“So no one knows what they — what their _faces_ , or whatever, are like.” 

“No one who could tell us.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“We know that they must have — like a mandible, researchers call it. Some kind of mouth. There are all these horrible artist’s renderings that you shouldn’t look at. They always reminded me of — did you ever see the movie _Alien_?” 

Harry nodded. “Do you really think they look like that?” 

“I don’t think so. I think they have to have some kind of mechanism for sensing and breathing, and they certainly have a mouth. Because it’s sort of their most fearsome weapon — the kiss, it’s called colloquially. Animectomy, in technical terms. Removal of the soul.” 

Harry’s silence seemed shocked. Remus wondered if he had seen the _Prophet_. “So they kill — ”

“No, it’s worse… The death penalty for criminals is illegal under international wizarding law. One can technically survive without a soul. But — I emphasize technically. There’s no self — no memory. Just a shell.” He continued before he could stop himself. “It was in the paper this morning,” he said. “It’s what they’re going to do to Sirius Black. Fudge has given the dementors permission to perform the Kiss if they find him.” 

Remus could imagine it, almost unbidden. How many times had he reached himself for a kiss in the darkness — 

“He deserves it,” Harry said, blunt and sudden. He put the empty bottle of butterbeer on the desk with a clunk. 

He realized he too had thought so once, just after, when he had simply wished it would be over as quickly as possible. The Kiss had been on the table in the trial, Dumbledore had later told him. Instead the jury had sentenced Sirius to life in Azkaban; they had found that decades of torture was a punishment that better suited the crime. When the wound had calcified and festered some Remus found he agreed. And then years and years and years had gone on and now he found with disappointment and some surprise that it was different than he had thought it would ever be. It could not be forgiveness; it was more like exhaustion. A kind of peace, or settlement. Glassy open water after a storm — a strange calm approaching his own kind of hollowed vacancy.

“Do you really think so,” he asked Harry. “Do you think anyone deserves to lose everything that makes them human?” 

“He does if anyone does.” 

“But does anyone? That’s what I mean. If one person does — even if it’s someone who did something so terrible — than anyone does.” 

“But he killed — ”

“I’m intimately familiar, Harry, with what he did.” 

“And you don’t think he deserves it?” 

“I used to.” 

“So what do you think now?” 

“That more death and horror is altogether inadvisable. And that if we are going to attempt to use any semblance of goodness as an ideological weapon in the next war we would do well to walk the walk.” 

“The next war,” Harry said. 

“Yes.” 

“I thought so.” 

“That’s good. It’s better the less surprised you are by these things.” 

“But how can you be so calm about it?” 

It was such a James sort of question it twinged a little in the old wound. _How can you be so calm about what he did? How can you forgive him — I haven’t forgiven him. How can you let it go so easily?_ He couldn’t tell Harry — and it even been a wrench to try and explain to James — since his childhood and the subsequent transformative Event he had learned as a sort of defense mechanism to swallow and silence every hurt because there would only be more. It was defeat more than anything else, he remembered trying to tell James. It was the strange scorched-earth peace and certainty that comes with defeat. It was only that — it had only ever been that. 

“I don’t know,” he told Harry. “Inoculation, I suppose.” 

Harry pressed the heels of his hands briefly into his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s just.” 

It seemed he couldn’t go on. “It’s just what,” Remus prodded. 

“You didn’t hear the news?” 

His stomach dropped out as it seemed it usually did upon employment of that phrase. “I don’t think so. What news?” 

Harry sighed and reached in the pocket of his robes. He pulled out a tattered piece of newsprint which he passed across the desk to Remus. _Kurt Cobain, Hesitant Poet of ‘Grunge Rock,’ Dead at 27,_ said the headline. By the font it seemed Harry had torn it from the _New York Times_. 

“Hermione started subscribing to some American papers when I told her what you said about the Sanguicrats,” Harry said. “So she gets the _Times_ with the daily wizarding section.” 

Remus skimmed through the obituary, noting the suspected suicide, and passed the cutout back across the table. Harry put it back in his pocket as though it were some relic of a martyred saint. “How about you put on _In Utero_ ,” he said. “I think it’s toward the end of the stack. I just had it on the other day. Do you want another butterbeer?” 

“Sure.” 

He cracked them open against the desk while Harry put the record on and rewound it to the beginning of “Serve the Servants” and sat again with a kind of grim exhaustion on one of the poufs. Remus recalled dimly being ten years old and learning from his parents about the deaths of Joplin and Hendrix and Brian Jones and Jim Morrison and trying to remember how they had presented the information. Surely he hadn’t understood they had died of drug overdoses until his teens. Perhaps even he had learned about that from Sirius and James. For a moment he entertained changing the subject completely and asking Harry what other records he'd heard that had been produced by Steve Albini ( _Spiderland, Surfer Rosa_ , etc. etc). But if no one else was going to attempt to provide this child with key life lessons it was going to have to be his pathetic responsibility. Not that he had really learned anything useful from any of his own life lessons. 

“Have you ever heard the band Big Star,” Remus said, handing Harry his butterbeer. 

“What? No.” 

“You can borrow some records from me. Anyway when I was eighteen one of the songwriters died — his name was Chris Bell. It was when things were starting to get bad with the war. We’d just finished school like six months before and it was beginning to become very clear to me that there would be — well it wouldn’t be how I’d imagined. It wasn’t going to be, finishing school and getting a Ministry job making money and making my parents proud and doing good things. We’d — ”

“You mean you and my dad?” 

“Oh — yes, of course — ”

“And Sirius Black. And Peter Pettigrew.” 

He had fixed Remus across the desk with the eyes. In the silence between them charged and trembling Kurt’s singing seemed to fit like a third conversant. 

“Yes,” Remus said. “The four of us. It wasn’t going to be how any of us had imagined. Your dad had been talking since fifth year about how he was going to work at Amortentia Records and sign actually good wizarding bands and et cetera et cetera. But then, you know, it was ’78, and we were looking for jobs, and first it just felt like doing favors for Dumbledore. Any chance you could keep an eye on this house this weekend, he would say. You just need to hang around and tell me if anyone goes inside. But toward the end of the year it started to feel real. And like this _was_ what we all were doing now. That it wouldn’t just be over quickly and we could get on with our lives. But anyway in the very end of December ’78 I learned that Chris Bell had died. We were all holding onto it like, at the edge of the cliff, with our fingernails. This hope that it wouldn’t be all there was. So I just remember — I got the news in some American Muggle music magazine, just like you. And I remember thinking, how terrible, how particularly terrible, that someone, you know, who’s shown you how to live in the world, that they don’t anymore. That they can’t.” 

This was perhaps the wrong route to have taken. He could tell Harry was crying a little though he was pretending to study the peeling animated paper label of his butterbeer. 

“Anyway it felt like a symbol to me and I kept listening to this old Big Star album called _#1 Record_ over and over for months on end and I think your dad nearly killed me. I would bring it over to your parents’ house to play it. I think the moral of the story is it’s terrible to lose somebody you admire and I’m very sorry. But death is part of life. And sometimes life is so hard — ” 

“Why?” 

“I’m sorry?” 

“Why does it have to be so hard?” 

He was stunned for a moment. “Don’t ask me,” he said finally. “Nobody knows. But music makes it easier. Doesn’t it?” 

Harry looked away. “I guess,” he said. 

“That’s the — the only restful thing I suppose. When you lose someone you have their art forever. You have — well. You have a piece of their soul forever.” 

Harry watched him again across the table. In the silence the record had come to the end of the side; it skipped rhythmically over the playout groove. Don’t you see, Remus wanted to say, almost said, what do we stand to lose, what sanctified relic, what calcified memory, and what ancient auguries, what cartography to uncertain places, what priceless artifacts, what prophesies, what imagination, what certainty, what promise that he or anyone was ever good, and what philosophy, what sort of proof of the duality of man’s nature, what testimonials on the fucked Gordian knot of love (or whatever this feeling was approximating love but hollower and very wounded), what cryptid beings unrecorded in any other annals, what music, what dreams, what pain, what exquisite perfect pain, what will we lose if we lose his soul? 

He bit his tongue on it. It was all turning inside his head skipping over and over again against the playout groove. Eventually he turned the record over and put the volume up and he and Harry listened to side B in a kind of content and hurting silence: 

_What else should I be  
_ _All apologies_

\--

**A Tribe Called Quest, _Midnight Marauders_**

[ Received at midnight, like a witch or a nightmare, with the tape enclosed. Delivered by an irate toucan. ] 

August 4, 1994  
  
R.J. Lupin  
Wyke Rd.  
Castle Cary  
Somerset  
United Kingdom

Moony, 

I found this cassette in a bargain bin. I wish I could tell you where. Altogether I can’t figure out why it’s there because it’s so good. It’s not only the title, why I’m sending it to you. So I hope you haven’t heard it yet and you are just now hearing it for the first time. It kills me how much music I missed. I’d love a letter from you if you can bear it or you can just send me a list of tapes to buy. Actually there is a phenomenal record store here. Listening to this I felt my self growing back and I started remembering how many records we listened to together for the first time ’71 through ’81. It feels wrong to me to listen to something for the first time without you. So here it is for you to listen to. And I hope you will write to me to tell me what you think about it. 

I’ve been trying to write this to you for a long time. In October or so I think I saw you in your office window and it nearly ruined me. You were wearing that Irish fisherman’s sweater I think was your dad’s. I was just crying. I think I’d thought you were dead or something. I only remembered you sometimes and I only remembered what you’d looked like when I’d done something horrible to you. 

I can’t even tell you how sorry I am and I want you to know I forgive you for everything, I always have, and I did years ago, it’s gone now, it’s been eaten out of my brain pretty much. I forgive you. How could I ever not forgive you. And I am here on the beach praying every day you will forgive me. I don’t even remember everything I did. I think it’s coming back but I don’t know. I don’t think all of it ever will. If you forgive me, it won’t make anything go away, I have to write that so I can convince myself of it. I think if you forgive me it might be easier to bear but I also don’t want to put that weight on you. I don’t know. Try and see if you can if you ever do one more thing for me. 

I love you, if it’s alright to say… or I guess I’ve said it. 

Yours,  
SB

\--

[ Scrawled on the back of the closest page of his research notes on Remus’s bedside table; the verso depicted a mass kelpie execution in Estonia in 1910 almost too grotesque to look at but seemingly censored by the blur and fuzz of the _gemino_ spell. Burned on the hotplate making darjeeling twenty minutes later along with the pads of two fingers. ] 

You fuck and your outsize bulldozer feelings. You are so cleverly manipulative that I’m almost more impressed than livid about it. What were you going to do if I got this and didn’t forgive you? Also I thought prolonged exposure to dementors was supposed to drain a wizard’s magical ability and emotional capacity. Maybe you should have found some space in this missive to thank me for inspiring you to become an animagus in the first place as it seems to have deus ex machina’d you out of considerable negative side effects — 

Anyway all I’ve wanted since even before you went away is to hear you say you love me and believe you and I think you know this so fuck you. 

\--

[ Written the next morning at the kitchen table unslept and watching at the rain whilst listening to the cassette spin in midair. Also later burnt on the hotplate. ] 

I think I remember the last record we listened to together in ’81 was X’s _Wild Gift_. You probably don’t remember. My God it kills me. You should know I broke a lot of our old records and I actually threw a bunch of them into the pond in Regent’s Park whilst very wasted which I regret now because there were plenty of times in the interim I was extraordinarily broke and could have sold the first editions. Anyway I haven’t listened to _Wild Gift_ since. There’s a lot I haven’t listened to since; in fact I think I forget about some of it. I’ve erased that from my mind through whatever — I think we have internal processes that do what dementors do, don’t you? Like all those Muggle studies where people in sensory deprivation chambers go insane alone with themselves… your own mind is all you need to drive yourself mad. A dementor is like a kind of manifest pressure or like a magnet. But I think I had some version of one inside my head for a while just living there so maybe, probably, a lot of things you don’t remember I don’t remember either, or I remember them wrongly. I am sitting here now wondering how I ever could have really believed it was you. For thirteen years… but it was some kind of trick I think. My brain playing a trick. The war fucked us both and I know you know this. 

I’m thinking of you wherever you are listening to this record and thinking of me. It kills me, Sirius. I can’t believe you when you say you forgive me. After it all — after thirteen years and then that night how could you forgive me? I’ll never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself for the fact you thought I was the guilty one. Actually also I may never forgive you for thinking that but logically I have vowed to never forgive you for so many things and I have forgiven you for everything. So I think probably I have already forgiven you or else I would not be writing you this letter. 

I only want to have you back maybe not like it was but maybe something else. I don’t know what either of us can stand after how it went last time. How could we even ever have done that, I’ve been wondering. How fucking stupid to think we could get away with love in those days. So maybe these days are not that different so this is still incredibly fucking stupid… seemingly though that is our mutual modus operandi. And I am nothing if not a person who adheres to a schedule. I feel like I’ve lived the same day over and over again and now time has started moving. I got dizzy walking around the other day in the garden like all of a sudden the earth was moving under my feet. 

You’ve said so many horrible things to me without asking permission and I never could tell you what to do or not so I don’t know why you’re asking. But it’s okay and I love — 

\--

[ Tied to the leg of the ostentatious toucan on the windowsill of the family home in Castle Cary after two sleepless nights. Shoved out the window before he could second-guess anything about it again. Regretted fiercely for years for evolving reasons. Later irrelevant. Discovered by Harry amongst some of Sirius’s personal effects in the Grimmauld Place house and eventually burned out of grief. ] 

August 6, 1994

S, 

Thank you for the letter and for your forgiveness. And for the tape which I enjoy. My favorite is “Award Tour.” 

Around here everyone is listening to _Parklife_ by Blur which is quite good if very laddish. 

[ Magically erased here: It makes me think of how everything we listened to when we were kids just seemed to me like the greatest music ever just by virtue of being young and having experienced relatively little in terms of great art and also suffering, and also not so great art I guess, and I wonder how many kids are listening to _Parklife_ thinking, this is the greatest music ever. Or how many kids are listening to this tape and thinking it’s the greatest music ever and I wonder who’s closer to the truth. Of if we were closest to the truth saying things like that about Magazine’s _Real Life_ and Led Zeppelin IV… ] 

Also I have been listening to _Crooked Rain Crooked Rain_ by Pavement. 

[ Magically erased here: You’ll like it though it’ll probably hurt you to listen to. Actually I think this might be the best music ever — ] 

_Bee Thousand_ by Guided by Voices, _I Could Live in Hope_ by Low, Nirvana’s three LPs (Harry’s favorite), Polvo _Celebrate the New Dark Age_ , Huggy Bear _Taking the Rough with the Smooch,_ and an older one — Fugazi _13 Songs_. 

If you are really this bored you can look for the Autumn issue of _Review of Part-Human Affairs_ in which I have an essay. 

I forgive you and I am sorry. I miss you — I have missed you. 

[ Magically erased here: It’s alright to say. I’m trying — ] 

Be safe. I think we will see each other soon. 

Yours,  
RJL

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first fic i wrote for my [ongoing charitable challenge](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/159055870440/hello-inspired-by-fandomtrumpshate-and-because) which you can still sign up for if you are interested in taking part!  
> thank you very much to the lovely alivingpart for giving me the opportunity to write this. if you liked this story, consider a donation to [RAINN](https://www.rainn.org/) in her honor.  
> more coming soon.


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